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Republic of San Lorenzo.
“All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.” My Bokononist warning is this: Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either. So be it.
They won’t fight unless you keep shaking the jar. And that’s what Frank was doing, shaking, shaking the jar.
She used to talk about how she had three children—me, Frank, and Father.
Ilium,
alternate name of Troy
Troy, NY is home of Renssalaer
“The trouble with the world was,” she continued hesitatingly, “that people were still superstitious instead of scientific.
Another guy came in, and he said he was quitting his job at the Research Laboratory; said anything a scientist worked on was sure to wind up as a weapon, one way or another.
“Think of it!” said Dr. Breed. “Twenty-six people he had on his conscience!” “The mind reels,” I said.
what's worse, 26 people you looked in the eye to kill or hundreds of thousands you didn't?
She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.
His children had divided the ice-nine among themselves.
“That was one of his hobbies,” said Miss Faust. “What was?” “Photographing how cannonballs are stacked on different courthouse lawns.
Research means look again, don’t it?
As Bokonon says: “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”
Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
I smashed up my seventy-five-dollar violin on a big brass knob at the foot of my bed, and I went down to a florist shop and got the kind of box they put a dozen roses in, and I put the busted fiddle in the box, and I sent it to her by Western Union messenger boy.”
wtf dude
“have any idea what it was they killed!”
collateral damage... like victims of the bomb?
I looked up Fata Morgana at this point in my reading;
so nice to have this Kindle to do it for me!
Communism had nothing to do with it.”
communism was just a red herring.
Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty. But
it fell open to the chapter about the island’s outlawed holy man, Bokonon.
though not grotesque.
wow, how generous
a woman to whom God had given virtually nothing with which to catch a man,
duck you, dude
“Because he’s a homosexual,” whispered Minton. “She can tell that from an index, too.”
man, that's some gaydar
Hernando Cortes
Hernán? apparently either is correct
“That happiness is mine.”
“Father needs some kind of book to read to people who are dying or in terrible pain.
like King Leck tending to wounded animals...
“Look, friends,” I said, “either I came in too early or too late,
‘Son,’ my father said to me, ‘someday this will all be yours.’”
ooof that's some nihilism at is finest
The scratches formed a sort of spider’s web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry.
I'd love to hear his thoughts on my kids' artwork...
“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s …” “And?” “No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”
Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.” “How did he come to be an outlaw?” “It was his own idea. He asked McCabe to outlaw him and his religion, too, in order to give the religious life of the people more zest, more tang.
he follows this religion knowing it's fake. I guess it works?
“So life became a work of art,” I marveled.
McCabe knowing the agony of the tyrant and Bokonon knowing the agony of the saint. They both became, for all practical purposes, insane.”
I DID NOT KNOW what was going to come from Angela’s clarinet. No one could have imagined what was going to come from there.
um...a komodo dragon?
Tiger got to hunt, Bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?” Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.
“See the cat?” asked Newt. “See the cradle?”
“It’s named after Jesus Christ?” “Sure. Why not?”
And what opinion did Bokonon hold of his own cosmogony? “Foma! Lies!” he wrote. “A pack of foma!”
so I guess the point of Bokonism is that we willingly and knowingly "believe" lies so we can get through life and play our parts, tricking ourselves into finding meaning (which is humans' natural quest)
asking Angela and Newt why it was that they both carried little Thermos jugs, identical red-and-gray jugs
“Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”
Duffle, in the Bokononist sense, is the destiny of thousands upon thousands of persons when placed in the hands of a stuppa. A stuppa is a fogbound child.
so, our current political situation in 2025?
Her breasts were like pomegranates or what you will, but like nothing so much as a young woman’s breasts.
I am a man of the world, having had, by a reckoning I once made, more than fifty-three women.
congrats?
soles, my soles! My soul, my soul,
so he has a thing for feet?
Just man.”
bokononism is humanist?
to receive honors and creature comforts while escaping human responsibilities.
oof is this what he thinks of all scientists?
What was it he had hanging around his neck?”
...an albatross?
a Mongolian idiot.”
yay more ableism
jigaboo
aaaand the ethnic slurs.
